I had the pleasure of delivering my first official WebJunction conference presentation with Chrystie Hill on Saturday at LITA 08 in lovely Cincinnati. The topic was “Design for Participation.” We took attendees on a journey that included a short history of WebJunction, we talked about our design/development processes and choices, and looked forward into the next year or so at WebJunction.

With a lot of ground to cover in an hour, we kept things on a fairly high level. Overall though, I think we provided a nice overview and were able to dig into few areas during audience questions— we even had a live blogger who did a heck of job annotating our slides!

Some drive-by key points from the session:

• We are a learning community. It’s the combination of our LMS, CMS, and strong member / partner community that makes WJ special.
• We must design to maximize these strengths.
• Launch is dead. Iterative development of features and components is the way to go.
• A software organizations greatest skill is ading features. The most important strength? The ability to stay true to goals and leave some of those features on the drawing table.
• Our community trusts us. They’ll give us an opportunity to “get it right” as long as we are focused on delivering the tools and experience that make WJ special.

More detail is available in the slides at WebJunction. Please check them out and let us know if you have any questions.

-Tim